Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

Mierdaan writes "VMware's bare-metal hypervisor is available for free starting today. ESXi, which can either be installed or run from an embedded device available in certain servers, has a 32MB footprint and gives small businesses an easy way to get into the virtualization world, with easy upgrade paths to enterprise-level features such as (H)igh (A)vailability and (D)istributed (R)esource (S)cheduler. ESXi runs on most any hardware with a server-class disk controller, and previously retailed for $495. VMware is obviously shooting to prevent Microsoft's Hyper-V technology from gaining a foothold in the marketplace."

This zdnet blogger [zdnet.com] already gave it a spin on some commodity-like hardware (which it seems to me there might be a few here who will be so inclined) and has a nice write-up of the results as well as some good tips on how to avoid some trouble spots for those not fortunate enough to be putting this on enterprise level hardware.

Downloading the ISO does require creating an account with a ton of required fields - so there are a few minutes of typing involved. There is also the usual eula to agree too, which I need to go over before I do anything with the disc image I've downloaded.

"3.9 Audit Rights. You will maintain accurate records as to your use of the Software as authorized by this Agreement, for at least two (2) years from the last day on which support and subscription services ("Services") expired for the applicable Software. VMware, or persons designated by VMware, will, at any time during the period when you are obliged to maintain such records, be entitled to inspect such records and your computing devices, in order to verify that the Software is used by you in accordance with the terms of this Agreement..."

No wonder no one wants to read the EULA.

They don't want the VMware SWAT team busting in on them to see if they're using free software in accordance with the license.

I saw this too. The way I understand it (and I'm no lawyer, but...), I am not buying support or subscription, so I'm not obligated to keep records. This seems like a piece of boilerplate that doesn't really apply to a free eval version. Is there a different way to read that that I'm missing?

By installing software from this company you acknowledge you understand that we're a 90% owned subsidiary of EMC, a BSA [wikipedia.org] member company [bsa.org] and our auditors can come in to bankrupt you at any time if you can't prove on the spot [cnet.com] that the license is valid."

Any and all disparaging comments about the EULA, as per the terms of this Software Agreement, shall be kept for a minimum of at least two (2) milennia from the last day on which our Lord and Saviour ("Yahweh") expired for the applicable sins of mankind. VMware, or deities designated by VMware, will, at any time during the period when you are obliged to maintain such records, be entitled to inspect such records and your immortal soul, in order to verify that the darkest pits of the eternal pit of damnation a

ESXi and for that matter ESX will run on a variety of non qualified hardware. (Unsupported of course.) It will be interesting to see what kind of compatibility list people are able to come up with. It can't be worse than, say, the early days of Linux and 802.11....

ESXi server requires, at minimum, a storage controller which is not present in anything but enterprise level machines and costs about $250 street price to upgrade a compatible server (one with PCI-X slots.)

Really? It does? I never knew my little old P4 NAT machine under the desk with an Adaptec SCSI controller (aic7xxx) in it was such a power-house.

I guess the Broadcom 97xx (tg3) in the old Dell I've got here too is an enterprise class network interface controller. I'm all enterprise-y and I never knew i

If YOU knew the first thing about VMWare ESX YOU'D know that they use almost unmodified Linux drivers, and any device supported by the driver will work under ESX and ESXi just as well as it will work under Linux.

Not to mention if YOU were actually reading the thread YOU'D know that the GGP is complaining that he has to buy a $250 "Enterprise class" SAS controller and have a server with PCI-X slots in it, which is total crap. The only reason he thinks this is because the ZDNet blogger who wrote the "review" the GGP read is an idiot who has some weird fixation with SAS and totally ignores all the other available, cheaper and less troublesome storage options such as SCSI or an NFS mounted NAS.

Last but not least, you said it yourself: VMWare only support various certified platforms, but don't expect to get much support for ESXi anyway. ESXi will be fine in an enterprise setup you need a scratch server, or have a spare "supported" server lying around so you can be sure it will work. If you're expecting to throw ESXi on any old bit of whitebox crap and get enterprise quality server out of it, you're delusional. At the same time, whining that you can't setup a simple whitebox machine and run ESXi on it for your own uses because you have to buy a $250 SAS controller first is just uninformed crap.

Maybe if YOU had read the compatibility list you would know they don't test specific controllers, they test hardware platforms from server vendors.

Yer, and? Most vendors do that. That doesn't mean that it won't work on some commodity hardware you can buy though, since ummmmm, all those enterprisey systems are actually commodity hardware themselves.

I've had ESX(i) running very well on an Adaptec 2420SA SATA controller (I was thoroughly confused about the whole SAS thing) as well as some plain PC based sy

ESX or ESXi works just fine with a bunch of plain old IDE and SATA controllers...see here [vm-help.com] for more information.

You can't put virtual machines on an IDE drive, but you can put them on SATA disks with the controllers listed at that link. You don't get RAID on any of them, though, even if they have some sort of RAID available. ESX(i) only officially supports storing VMs on RAID arrays if the disks appear to be SCSI of some sort (including SAS, or SATA on an SAS-capable controller).

You could also use Openfiler [openfiler.com] to create iSCSI targets that ESXi can use to store VMs, and Openfiler can use any storage that any modern Linux can use, including Linux software RAID. This allows you to have a VMware ESX(i) setup permanently (ESX was available as a free 90-day trial) on some pretty cheap hardware.

You don't even need to mess with iSCSI if you don't want to: ESXi can use a plain old NFS NAS. That's not exactly a stretch.

As I've already pointed out, ESXi also runs quite happily on a bunch of bog-standard SCSI controllers like the Adaptec AIC7xxx range, so you don't even need remote storage of any kind, and certainly not an enterprise class SAN.

What I want to know is: can I use this, as a home user, use this to run Windows and Linux at the same time,/and/ play games (at full throttle) in Windows? Because I'd love to be able to run Linux full time and only load up Windows for the occasional game (without leaving Linux).

DirectX is your foe, and I too am waiting for something like this to work.

In the meantime, you really really really want to look at wine. That'll be your best bet for a quick way to do this. The only telling question is what sort of games are you wanting to switch over to WindowsXP to play in the first place? StarCraft, sure, Crysis, not.

Agreed. VMware has Microsoft totally beat in terms of what you can do with virtualization. I was able to set up an environment of clustered machines for testing an Exchange Active-Active cluster and it worked flawlessly (though it did require some fiddling with the vmx files). I asked a Microsoft guy about doing something similar and they said that it wasn't possible. Frankly, VirtualPC is a joke (no unlimited snapshots? No private LAN segments? No thanks.) and without the flexibility of their server produc

HyperV is also Xen aware. I played with it for a short period when RC1 was released, but was totally dissatisfied with it. I don't think VMWare has much to worry about as HyperV was not ready for production in my opinion at the time.

I was able to install Xen kernels in Fedora and CentOS without a problem in HyperV, but could not for the life of me get w2k3 or w2k8 to install, while both install without issue in my Xen cluster. Virtual Server 2005 was a far better product from Microsoft, but still way lacking as it required windows as the base OS.

Another lacking part I found with HyperV was poor ethernet support for *nix, limited to a realtech driver at 100Mbit. I really don't think enterprise clients will adopt HyperV for the one main reason of support though, it only officially supports SUSE, and if big enterprise clients can not purchase support for other linux distro's, they are not going to waste their time on Microsofts product.

What platforms did you test, and with what virtualized OS's? I've run some fairly comprehensive tests, but comparing ESX with paravirtualized Xen, Xen tends to perform as well on most benchmarks and significantly better on some (as expected, IO, system related and SMP scaling).

xen doesn't have virtualised DMA so it's all software copy via qemu.. that means that ethernet and hard disk both bottlneck making the performance very substandard.. about 1% of VMWare on the same hardware.

You can buy commercial drivers for it that speeds up the hard disk somewhat (nowhere near VMware speed though) but there seems to be nothing that stops the ethernet throughput sucking the bug one.

I've got an enclosure of 10 PowerEdge 1955s that I have ~ 6months to play with until I need to make them production servers. I'm sorely tempted to use this, but I'm unfamiliar with the ESX product line. What does this ESXi do for me?

their ESX software is an hypervisor that you must install directly on the hardware to start with. if you want to run linux/win under it, you need to get vmware server.

I disagree with the last part of what you said. The VMware Server product will let you run one or more virtual machines on top of Linux or Windows. ESXi has no underlying host OS, and is (supposed to be) a bare metal hypervisor, (god, I hate that word), allowing you to run one or more virtual machines on the bare metal, using only the hypervisor, (Without Windows or Linux booting first. The ongoing debate of whether ESX or ESXi leverages any *nix is not for me to engage in). VMware Server is a completel

I haven't looked at ESXi in depth. The biggest missing component I see is the lack of a service console--no command line. I have a few Dell 2550(?) that for some reason have CDrom issues that I need console access for.

It looks like you have plenty of time to install ESXi and play with it. As long as your virtual servers aren't resource hogs, you can save bundles in hardware. If you step up to ESX and Virtual Ifrastructure, you can manage all your VM's through a single server. You can move, with VMotion VM's from one hypervisor to another (running, if they are using the same SAN), take snapshots (and restore!) of running machines live. virtualizaiton makes your life so much easier.

I've got an enclosure of 10 PowerEdge 1955s that I have ~ 6months to play with until I need to make them production servers. I'm sorely tempted to use this, but I'm unfamiliar with the ESX product line. What does this ESXi do for me?

Not sure I follow you.

Virtualisation is very well covered in Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] and I won't waste time explaining it again now.

This offers a few features which are absent from VMWare Server:

1. Runs directly on bare metal. So you have to dedicate less disk space to a full-blown OS.2. Should perform better.3. Easy upgrade path to the paid version. The paid version is where things get really interesting - for instance, you can set up high-availability on a per-VM basis, effectively bringing HA to applications whic

And well worth it, I might add. It is a proven enterprise level technology and it really will save you money right out of the gate. I'm running 20 Windows Server 2003 boxen on a single HP DL385 G3 with 2 AMD 2218's and 16GB RAM, and I'm still only running at about 60-70% utilization.

For the standard version of Virtual Infrastructure you're going to spend around $2500-$6000, plus around $5000-$10000 for 1 or 2 servers to run it.

If the software doesn't suit you as a solution, don't complain about it, use something else.

This new free solution is perfect for me, as I've got enterprise level stuff running virtualization with Workstation. Nobody is debating whether this is a tool to getting you stuck with VMware, because it most certainly is.

If you don't mind rolling your own you can do a whole bunch of management via the VI API using, for example, Perl Toolkit. It's not necessarily simple but, hey, once you've written it, share it with other folks.

The enterprise-level management tools are necessary for complex setups but for smaller applications you are able to do a lot on your own. A whole lot! In addition to the obvious stuff like VM operations, you could probably do a clone, perhaps in a limited way, by copying and moving files in the datas

That's been a showstopper standing between us and vmware forever. Maybe it is finally supported, but I RTFA, then I even went and RTFWS and I couldn't find any mention of Firewire or IEEE 1394 (a or b).

I can think of a use for it: debugging something running in a virtual machine. Or if you have two mutually trusted VMs they could use it as an IPC mechanism that might outperform IP-based communications.

If you don't need it, don't provision the VM in question with a virtual firewire adapter.

Aside from the occasional maintenance task (like if you have misconfigured your network) there's no reason you want *want* to use the VMware console. Just like any other server that's not right under your desk, you'll be using X or RDC. Or a command line via ssh.

OK, so which of those remote access systems (X, MS Remote Desktop, or ssh) allow you to plug in a Firewire drive on the client machine and have it show up as a local drive on the the server (remote machine)?

RDP lets you see it as a network drive, and that still works fine even if the remote machine is a VM running under ESX. Neither of the others support any kind of "client drive visible on the remote machine" setup.

The problem is that ESX isn't like other virtualization systems where you have virtualizati

Okay, so when I plug it in (remembering that USB and FireWire are nothing like a serial port, except that bit about sole ownership by one process when in use) how do I specify without using the console that this time VM12 gets to use the device, and next time VM01 gets the device? Provided there's no fancy scipts involved.

Sure, if you're only virt'ing one machine, then always plugging it in and having it show up on the guest is fine, but what about when you run more than one machine? I'm not going to cons

You want a drive in your desktop machine to show up on your server? Um. As a local drive? Okay, that's not the way you would normally get things done, but let's go with it. Anyway you can export/share the drive from your desktop (be it Windows, Linux, or Mac) and then mount it from your VM as CIFS, or whatever, from Windows/Linux/Solaris. Assuming you don't have some horked up domain setup it should work fine.

Okay, let's see.

Yup works.

I don't know exactly what you have in mind here though. What are you moun

Why is VMWare on the laptop a bad idea? Granted, most lappy-s don't run VT (etc) enabled CPUs, so there's not really the efficiency factor, but:

I run VMs on my laptop all the time, and know several other folks who do as well. If this lead to a faster boot time overall, then I would be all for it being on most laptops. Keep a stripped version of FX3 on a stripped speedy loader, keep your *nix distro on a second VM, and your WinXPGames machine on a third, and goto town. The only question I have is if you

When you say "VMware" do you mean Workstation/Fusion? Or ESX/ESXi? Workstation and Fusion work fine on laptops. 1GB of RAM is pretty much a baseline though (I have 4GB in my MBP for Fusion).

There are people who have been able to run ESX on a laptop. I don't know how complicated it was to get going though. However, what you would do with a laptop running ESX, I'm not really sure. There's certainly nothing to look at on the screen other than a command line (ESX) or a BIOS-like config screen (ESXi).

Geez, Firewire won't be vanishing anytime soon. If all you want to do is run a slow ass pocket drive there's no particular need for it. You'll like it a lot better than USB with your 4000 dpi scanner though. And your video. And multichannel (24+) audio, which really won't function over USB. And anything that needs guaranteed throughput and latency. And the option for long cable runs. And so on. Let me know when USB does this.

As an example of Firewire audio which is definitely not intended primarily for LAPTOPS (I don't know where you came up with this), there's the eternally popular MOTU 828: http://www.motu.com/products/motuaudio/828mk3/. No one's going to be running this over USB any time soon.

For large or sustained transfers, Firewire has 2-4x the throughput of USB 2.0. Firewire 400 is almost always faster than USB 2.0 in any application even though USB 2.0 has a nominally higher speed.

Have you tried (I'm totally ignorant on this one) dd-ing the USB and loopback mounting it?

I'ld really like to know if there is someway to get around that little hiccup. The alternative I've usually seen is that they do an alternate verify, where it uses some amalgamation of hardware IDs installed on the system XOR'ed with the HD ID (like in DOS DIR C:\ -- volume serial number).

Er... if the virus is detecting your scanner, you've already lost the battle. Sure, the hypervisor would prevent the virus from having a sexy time with the scanner/firewall, but it will still infect everything else in the system.

Far better to just run a dedicated box with the firewall and virus scanner, to properly isolate your workstations from the idiotnet.

For my work we wanted to setup a HA cluster with 2 (or at worse 3) servers running both a Linux and Windows environment for some DRM stuff. So after years of just toying with VMWare server and simple VMs like that, I finally jumped into the wonderful world of hypervisors.I of course first tried the open source solutions, and boy was that a nightmare. First Xen, on a DRBD+OCFS2+Heartbeat environment. Never managed to get it to be stable, got either kernel panic from OCFS after some time, or the servers would hang when doing live migrations. Also tried the iSCSI way, and still no way to stabilize the thing.Then since I though the issue was with the only officially supported Xen kernel (2.6.18) I tried KVM since it's integrated into the mainline kernel. Well surprise, I got more or less the exact same result. Kernel panic when trying the migrate a VM...So I gave ESX a try, not really believing it would be any better. Well, it actually works, but while it was easier to set up than KVM/Xen for HA and stuff like that, it sure wasn't trivial either. I spent a lot of time on google researching the various issues I was having (who would think that you HAVE to use the names of the machines and not their IPs when setting up the HA stuff?), but at least I got it to work. The accounting people sure aren't happy with it though...

OK, I've RTFA. I've read the current comments here as far as they go when I start to write this. I'm still lacking understanding of what this is.

I've been using the free VMware player on-and-off for personal use. It works pretty well for what I've done with it (although sometimes the virtual machines get in a state where they refuse to start and I have to revert to a backup copy). I'm not able to find from the article or discussion here just what this brings to the table (or doesn't bring to the table) tha

Yes, let's get into arguments about what free is. Cause it's not like one could successfully argue (depending on one's precise definition of free) that GPL, BSD, $0, any of that, is/is not free. Come on, man, get off your high horse.

Look buddy. If I don't have to pay for it, by definition of what I have learned "free" to be my whole life, it is free.

"Free" as in, "short for freedom" is not, and shall never be, the default value of this term in my head. When you go to the store and get a "free sample", they are talking about cost. If I were to go to McDonalds for a promotion of "Free McNugget Wednesdays", you can bet I'll have a happy little lawsuit when they actually try to charge me and claim "It is free in that you can do whatever you want with it!"

If I were to go to McDonalds for a promotion of "Free McNugget Wednesdays", you can bet I'll have a happy little lawsuit when they actually try to charge me and claim "It is free in that you can do whatever you want with it!"

Yeah, I threatened to sue when the local market wanted me to pay for their so-called "Free Range Chickens".

Twenty-four years have passed since the GNU project began, and still it is extremely difficult to explain one of its fundamental tenets because of the poor choice of terminology. You have to convince someone that free doesn't mean what everyone else understands it to be.

Sometimes there is great value in standing your ground, insisting that the rest of the world change to fit your vision of things. This is not one of those instances.

If only there was another phrase that meant something along the lines of 'Open Source' we could use to avoid that ambiguity. Then the word 'free' could mean what everybody (even non GNU people) thinks it means, and this new phrase could mean what the GNU people are thinking (ie, 'Open Source') when they use the word 'free'.

Damned if I can come up with a catchy phrase that means 'Open Source' though... so I guess we're stuck fumble-fcuking around with the word 'free' and alienating people away from Linux i

If only there was another phrase that meant something along the lines of 'Open Source' we could use to avoid that ambiguity.

Good point you raise. Often when the free software people are doing their hand waving, they'll say that, unlike English, other languages have separate words to differentiate between free ("gratis") and freedom ("libre"). In my opinion, it would be an easier to convince others about the value of "software libre," or perhaps "liberated software," than to have to go down the rat-hole of free speech versus free beer.

trouble is open source isn't exactly a brilliant term either because there is plenty of software where the source is easilly availible (either to customers or even to the general public) but under licenses that mean you can do very little with it.

Marketing that I refer to is just this kind of thing: appear to be F/OSS so that the unwashed masses who are really beginning to understand F/OSS better will mistake your product for one of those "new-fangled cool programs" that is free.

Like puffing up a bag of chips with air to make it seem like more product, or making the bag opaque so you can't see how little is inside.

No, you didn't miss it, it's Cathedral but others *will* miss it. It's as good as the 'no payments for a year' scam. I truly believe we a

To sell you the features that extend it, such as management, hot migration to other machines, etc. The ESXi is cool, but a very, very base product. If you start playing with it, you will want to pay for all the features that go along with ESX to manage, deploy, etc..

Embedded ESX supports a large subset of the VI API (basically, everything that a standalone host can give you). You can write Perl or Java to your heart's content and get ESXi to jump through hoops. Virtual Center uses the VI API and it's quite possible you can write something you enjoy better. Go check out the Virtual Infrastructure SDK.

You mean "their" business model, not "there" business model; the latter word refers to location, while the former refers to possession.

They're VMware. They have plenty of products they charge (lots and lots of) money for; giving away low-end freebies isn't going to hurt their bottom line much, as anyone running a QA department will want to have the management tools &c. that come with the full releases, without needing a developer to write local toolage (which can be even more expensive, after opportunity cost for the staff involved is taken into account).

I'm not overly worried about Player cutting into their marketshare; frankly, I think VMware Server poses a bigger risk in the small-customer space (though the limited snapshot support pretty much puts a ceiling on that one's use). That said, I'm presently employed by a Fortune 100, and we're perfectly happy to pay for VMware ESX -- which is what they're trying to leverage customers of lower-end products towards anyhow.

For the moment, virtualization software has a substantial lock-in effect; the APIs for doi

Couple of things:VMW and VB can use the same vHDs, so unless you're talking about the snotty little text file that you can manipulate in nano faster than through the interface, that's just rather gauche to say that they don't use the same containers (I seem to recall that it's totally programmable if one person has already done it and given you their input and their performance. Sure the mechanics may be slightly different, but that's just semantics at this point when you're talking about a front end). No

I think vmware is going to struggle long term though. As MS and FOSS keep uppping the features I think vmware will strugle to find features that people are willing to pay for.

Actually, VMware is the current industry leader in virtualization, FOSS and MS need to do a bit of catching up to VMWare, especially Microsoft as I've used that floating piece of crap called Virtual PC and Virtual Server. I haven't seen a FOSS product that can do the kind of resource allocation and load sharing that Virtual Infrastru

Also you can surf the web for other management applications written using the VI API. There are some out there already and I think that the release of ESXi will really accelerate this. Which is a good thing because VC could use a kick in the pants (would be good for VMware too).

I don't know about that. One thing the MS Markleting Machine knows is that installed base is difficult to replace (otherwise.. well, you know the rest). VMWare is the "industry leader" in virtualisation, even the place I work which is seriously pro-MS dumped Virtual PC/Server for VMware ESX back when they had to pay for it and bought a load fo licences.

I think MS will keep on fighting, will keep on giving stuff away for 'free' (all you have to do is buy a copy of Windows Server 2008:) ) and VMware will kee

Short answer: No, this is not an adequate replacement. Think ESXi == host-os. Can you directx from a guest? No.

At the very least, this is my so-far uninformed decision. Now, if you never have a need for directx or the like, sure, this would work. My advice, as I use either VMWareServer or VirtualBox (depending on the machine) is to stay with what you have.